Case Number 21812: Small Claims Court

THE KIDS GROW UP

The Charge

Letting go is hard to do.

Opening Statement

After finding critical success with 51 Birch Street, a documentary
about his parents' troubled marriage, filmmaker Doug Block tilts his camera down
the ol' family tree and makes a documentary about his daughter.

Facts of the Case

Finishing her last year of high school in New York City, Lucy Block finds her
father's camera in her face a fair bit more often than she'd like. On what must
be a completely unrelated note, she's hoping to attend college about as far from
home as is geographically possible in the lower 48 states, in California. Dad
Doug divides the screen time in The Kids Grow Up between interviews with
his reluctant daughter, chats with other empty nesters about how to let go of
college-age children, and home video footage he's been taking of Lucy since her
toddler years.

The Evidence

Of all the familial pairs one could put under the microscope of a personal
documentary, prying father plus distant teenage daughter seems the most likely
to result in squirm-inducing awkwardness on-screen. Indeed, that turns out to be
the case with The Kids Grow Up. In almost all of her interactions with
her camera-wielding father during her senior year, Lucy varies between apparent
boredom, irritation, dismissiveness, and outright anger. Though viewers will
certainly have a range of responses to their on-screen relationship, I
personally sympathized with Lucy's attitude. It's hard for most parents to
remain emotionally close with their kids throughout their teenage years, and it
feels like Doug is dashing any hopes of that by insisting on talking to Lucy
about her life with the camera running. He claims at one point, "I'd rather
be a good parent than make a good film." I'm sure Doug believes that to be
true and maybe it is, but it's the reverse of this statement that came across
for me watching The Kids Grow Up. Between his pestering ways with Lucy
and his not-as-charming-as-he-thinks resistance to "growing up"
himself, Doug is not going to come off as a sympathetic presence in the film for
all viewers.

The suspicion that Lucy is not a fully willing participant in this film and
the feeling that Doug should not necessarily be making it do not prevent
Kids from being a compelling documentary -- but they do make it an
ethically uncomfortable one to watch. What may decrease one's enjoyment of the
film further is the fact that a teenager who comes off as emotionally
disconnected and doesn't want to share much of anything personal on-camera is
hard to build a great documentary around. Again, I'm not being critical of Lucy
herself here: if anything, I respect her for resisting a kind of public
vulnerability she clearly doesn't want. But one can only watch an 18-year-old
mumble "I don't know" and "I'm tired of being filmed" at her
father for so long.

One can also only hear Doug question whether he's ready for his only
daughter to leave home, or ask other parents how they dealt with that situation,
so many times. While the subject of parents facing the departures of their
children is certainly worthy of documentary exploration, it probably could have
been explored in 75 minutes more effectively than in 90.

All of the above being said, there are some really wonderful moments in
The Kids Grow Up. What the documentary gets right is the bittersweet and
all-too-fast nature of the title process. At one point, 18-year-old Lucy snaps
at Doug about how she doesn't want to be filmed and as the defeated father
retreats from her presence, we cut to footage from Lucy's childhood. Doug is
holding the camera, pointing it down at a perhaps 4-year-old Lucy, who has one
of her hands in his and the other clutching a stuffed raccoon. She skips along
happily in the sunshine, exclaiming in the cutest little voice that she likes to
be filmed and likes to see herself on the TV. The juxtaposition of these two
pieces of footage show us not just how much Lucy has grown and changed, but how
painful some of those changes have been for Doug -- a father who long ago saw
his daughter delight in the tools of his trade and misses that connection they
once shared. In fact, almost any footage of the younger Lucy sparkles on screen,
from her passionate declaration on the day of getting her ears pierced, "it
feels like my life has just changed!" to her sassy 10-year-old response to
Doug's question about remembering her childhood, "I am a child. This is my
childhood."

As a fan of autobiographical documentary, I wish I liked The Kids Grow
Up more. I also wish I wasn't in the position of needing to criticize the
lives of actual people. But that's one of the many perils of choosing to make
such a film: you and your loved ones become characters in a real-life narrative
and subject to the approval or disapproval of your audience.

Considering that it uses home video dating back to the early '90s, The
Kids Grow Up looks and sounds pretty good -- probably owing to the fact that
the home video was shot by a professional filmmaker. Docurama also provides a
hearty helping of special features. A 9-minute interview with Doug Block delves
deeper into his motivations for making 51 Birch Street and The Kids
Grow Up. His comments about the tension between making a good film and
keeping harmony in the family are interesting, as he notes with reluctance,
"what works in a film and creates drama is conflict." Five minutes of
outtakes give us three cute segments featuring a young Lucy that don't appear in
the film. Doug Block also includes a touching 15-minute tribute to a family
member who appears in Kids and has since died. Finally, a 12-minute
featurette gives us Doug's interviews with his wife and with Lucy after the
release of the film, getting their perspective on how it all turned out. Lucy
sums things up in a revealing way: "[Leaving] was pretty easy for me. The
only thing that made it hard was this movie. It put this tension on our
relationship; I really felt that way."

Closing Statement

Early in The Kids Grow Up Doug's spirited wife Marjorie, when prodded
about her opinion of the film Doug is embarking on, remarks, "Just think:
when [Lucy] works all this through in therapy, she can bring the footage with
her." She's laughing as she says these words, but she's not kidding. And
she's probably right!

The Verdict

Guilty of bugging the family with a camera, then showing the results to a
mass audience.